As a company moves through its lifecycle, patent searches can provide critical feedback, allowing stakeholders to manage investments and risks more efficiently. Depending on the business goals being pursued at the time, it is possible to tailor the objectives of a patent search.

The registration of a patent is one of these objectives, as are abandoning a patent right, introducing a product, and asserting a patent claim against a rival. Taking actions based on incomplete or inaccurate information can have long-term financial repercussions.

To perform patent searches on their behalf, all major corporations hire qualified in-house and external experts. Prior to this post, we discussed how we select free academic search engines and bibliographic databases to search for non-patent literature. These are our top five picks for free patent search engines, which anyone can use to find information about patents.

How do patent search engines work?

As part of the patentability search process, a patent database can provide rapid and accurate results to an inventor, intellectual property expert, or a legal professional. By utilizing these widely-accepted patent search databases, many intellectual property law firms assist innovative individuals and businesses in identifying prior art in the form of patents.

Using this type of database, you can quickly gather and analyze information, and generate a report for practical purposes.

Five Patent Searching Tools That You Should Know About

Google Patents

Google created the Intellectual Property Search Database in 2006, and it is considered one of the best intellectual property search engines available today. In intellectual property law firms, packages that conduct an in-depth search for future patents are essential since few patent searching packages perform such a search. Therefore, you should double-check with Google Patents. You can locate the appropriate patent by typing its name into Google Search. A direct link to the patent is often found in the first result as well. There are more than 87 million patents in the Google Patents database, including patents from countries like the United States, China, Japan, Korea, and Europe.

Espacenet

Espacenet’s IP Search is among the most comprehensive online databases. The service gives you access to patent organizations from over 98 different countries. By using this free IP database, law firms that offer intellectual property services can better serve their clients.

Spacenet’s patent database contains more than 110 million patents. Thus, it can assist intellectual property firms in resolving some of the most challenging patent art and novelty searches.

Three types of search tools are available in the IP database: Smart Search, Advanced Search, and Classification Search. Intellectual property law firms can use the Advanced Search tool to find patents on a specific subject matter since it can search by publication number, application number, priority number, inventor name, and publication date.

The Lens Org

One of the earliest digital patent databases, Lens Org, should be familiar to patent lawyers. This open database (EPO) combines information from the world’s top patent authority organizations, including the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the World Intellectual Property Organization, and the European Patent Office. From 1907 to 2001, more than 81 million documents were found in the European Patent Office’s bibliographic database, USPTO patent applications from 2001 to 2006, USPTO patents (granted) from 1976 to present day, USPTO assignments dating back more than 14 years, EPO grants since 1980, WIPO patent applications since 1978, and IP Australia patent applications since 1978.

Lens’ extensive and comprehensive database allows users to search a wide variety of metadata including publication, filing, priority, and extended patent family sizes, among others. This database is incredibly useful for patent professionals who want to offer their clients an easy-to-access, user-friendly, worldwide patent database. Additionally, the INPADOC patent status and family information service allows you to search for lapsed, abandoned, or expired U.S. patents in your area. Patent families can also be represented using the graphical tree format in PDF.

It is also possible to analyze data using dynamic charts provided by Lens.org, according to the website.

PatentScope

The World Intellectual Property Organization maintains PatentScope, a free patent search database. Patent applications filed worldwide under the Patent Co-operation Treaty (PCT) are now available in full-text via this browser-based patent search database. Among the papers included in this database are those that have been registered under the jurisdiction of other cooperating regional patent administrations.

Design View

DESIGN View, an online design patent database, is a free service that you can use to search for patents. EUIPO launched a similar database several years ago, and it has since become increasingly popular (EUIPO). This database contains a total of 16,941,630 registered designs from 72 national offices around the world. With its intuitive interface, you can easily navigate this database. You can narrow the scope of your search using the basic search and advanced search. Additionally, these databases allow for side-by-side comparisons of designs. Moreover, it is available in 37 different languages, allowing patent attorneys to conduct patent searches in a language they are comfortable with.

Conclusion

Following this essay, I believe it should be clear to any reader that patent search databases could dramatically shorten the time it takes to conduct patent searches. The same technologies may also assist patent attorneys to streamline the patent search process, navigate through patent papers effectively, and draw the most effective conclusions from them.